By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser. In the United States, we often think of colleges and universities as the anchors of their communities. A campus is often among the largest employers in the region, a significant consumer of local goods and services, a critical supporter of local businesses, and a major attractor of new people to the region. Not only does a college educate the next generation of the work force, but it also plays a major role in enhancing the local quality of life and economy. That role is even more important as other employers close or relocate elsewhere. No matter how bleak the local economic and demographic situation may become, the college campus is a reliable community stalwart and rarely a credible threat to bolt. The news out of Singapore, however, demonstrates why we can’t say the same for international branch campuses. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. As many of us return to campus this fall, we’ll be passing by various buildings adorned with Greek letters that fewer can identify every year. I’m talking about the fraternity and sorority houses, of course—what’s known as Greek life and causes an annual tug-of-war at many institutions. Alumni/ae wax nostalgic over the lifelong bonding that marked their Greek experience. Faculty complain of the hungover frat members they see on Friday mornings. Deans tally the numbers hauled off to the hospital. Women’s and minority organizations criticize gender-related violence and exclusionary policies. And current members of fraternities and sororities tune it all out in order to plan their fall bash and their rush protocols. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. I wrote recently from Bosnia and Herzegovina about the curious practice of taking a unitary language and trying to find ways of representing it as several different languages for political reasons, in order that each of several ethnic groups should be able to claim a tongue of its own. I wrote on the basis of my own experience in the country rather than delving into reference books about it. But after my return I checked the classic reference work on the languages of the world: the Ethnologue. The Ethnologue is published as a book by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in numerous editions. The latest edition is the 16th, published in 2009 (see the Amazon.com entry for Ethnologue: Languages of the World). It incorporates the ISO 639-3 standard inventory of three-letter language identifiers (you are currently reading ENG, of course). More...

By William Germano. I don’t run with a foodie crowd, but I cheer them on. Food writers, chef-authors, food editors. They spin out our foodie dreams for us. But as the Anglophone world becomes more fashion-forward foodwise, the language of food becomes an ever more puzzling place. There isn’t a Chicago Manual of Culinary Style, though maybe there should be. If there were I’d turn to it for advice linguistic, culinary, and social. My first food questions for a culinary grammarian: When we talk about foreign dishes, when should we deploy a foreign plural? When do we activate unfamiliar foreign forms?
I’ll  stick with Italy, or at least the imaginary Italy that sings its siren call at the American table. More...

By Jeff Selingo. Higher ed, welcome to Obamacare. Frustrated by how his policies of the past four years haven’t stalled rising college-tuition prices or moved the needle on the number of students, particularly low-income students, graduating from college, President Obama took on the higher-ed establishment on Thursday, declaring bluntly that the federal government cannot just keep chasing college prices with federal aid but not getting better results. More...

By Geoff Shullenberger. Steven Pinker wants to save the humanities from themselves. In a bracing manifesto in The New Republic, he laments that humanists have consigned themselves to intellectual stagnation, departmental downsizing, and unemployment by ignoring advances in the natural sciences that could revolutionize their disciplines. He contends that humanist resistance to applications of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to the study of history, art, and literature evinces a retrograde hostility to science and indeed the Enlightenment project. Amidst a barrage of recent obituaries for the humanities, some wistful and some perversely gleeful, it is reassuring to hear Pinker declare that “there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite [humanist] scholars can apply” and that the humanities “are indispensable to a civilized democracy.” More...

By Sara Goldrick-Rab. Over all, I’m a fan of President Obama’s proposal to rate colleges and link the results to financial aid. The plan is to give students attending institutions rated high—on such measures as tuition and graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of low-income students enrolled—larger grants, as well as lower-interest loans. The proposal ends the “tinkering” that most higher-education reform has pursued; it aims squarely at the main drivers of college costs: private and for-profit institutions (and their happy followers, the elite public flagships) and states. That is the approach my colleagues and I argued for in a recent paper for the American Enterprise Institute. More...

By Biddy Martin. I applaud President Obama for putting the importance of a college education squarely at the center of the national agenda in his speech at the University at Buffalo, and for insisting that students get the education they need regardless of economic circumstances. He is right to insist on greater clarity in how colleges and the government inform prospective students and their families about the net price of attendance, the availability of financial aid, student debt, and graduation rates. Holding institutions accountable for providing a quality education and helping graduates with reasonable loan-repayment policies are not only legitimate but essential. His emphasis on value will bring much-needed attention to the question of how we define, measure, and reward it. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. If there’s going to be a MOOC equivalent to a Hollywood blockbuster, it may well be Larry J. Sabato’s course this fall called “The Kennedy Half Century”—a course that will have as media companions an hourlong PBS documentary starring Mr. Sabato and his latest book, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Sabato, the University of Virginia politics professor who is a frequent guest on news broadcasts, is recording about eight hours of video for the monthlong course, which will begin with John F. Kennedy’s early legislative career and then cover both his presidency and his influence on the decades since his assassination 50 years ago this November. The course, which starts on October 21, will be broken into 40 lessons, each 10 to 20 minutes long and each incorporating a quiz. A final examination is “not optional,” according to the course Web site, which is now accepting registrations. More...

By Megan O'Neil. Developing online classes and other nontraditional teaching approaches could earn colleges money under new federal financing priorities proposed on Thursday by President Obama. More colleges should be encouraged “to embrace innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st-century economy and maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank,” the president said in a speech at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York. The financial rewards for such innovation would be part of a larger retooling of financing priorities, Mr. Obama said. Under his proposal, the Department of Education would have two years to create a college-rating system to help students and their parents determine the value of an institution. More...